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Friday, June 24, 2016

Kshama Sawant — Beyond Bernie: Still Not With Her

A huge debate is unfolding among millions of Bernie’s backers, providing an enormous opportunity for the left to raise the need for a political alternative to the Democratic Party. That’s why Movement4Bernie and Socialist Alternative are organizing a series of forums in dozens of cities across the country titled “Beyond Bernie: We Need a Party for the 99%.” These forums will both mobilize for the largest possible protests at the Democratic National Convention and create space for a broad-based debate on the way forward for the political revolution. My message at the events will be clear: If Bernie refuses to break from the Democratic Party, our movement should back Jill Stein as the strongest left alternative in the presidential election and use 2016 to prepare the ground for building a new movement-based political alternative.…

This lady is super-articulate and she is on fire. I sense a leader.

Having a PhD in economics and coming from a socialist POV, she seems ultimately reachable by MMT and a Lerner-Kalecki-Sraffian-Post Keynesian approach to political economy.

Kshama Sawant is an American politician who sits on the Seattle City Council. A former software engineer, Sawant became a socialist activist and part-time economics instructor in Seattle after immigrating to the United States. Sawant ran unsuccessfully for the Washington State House of Representatives before winning her seat on the Seattle City Council. Sawant was the first socialist to win a city-wide election in Seattle since Anna Louise Strong was elected to the School Board in 1916.…

Shocked by the level of poverty she saw [after emigrating to the US], Sawant decided to abandon the computer engineering field. She pursued studies in economicsbecause of what she described as her own "questions of economic inequality." She entered the economics program at North Carolina State University where she earned a PhD. Her dissertation was titled Elderly Labor Supply in a Rural, Less Developed Economy. Sawant moved to Seattle in 2006 and became a Socialist Alternative party member. She became a United States citizen in 2010. — Wikipedia

It's called sending a message. As long as both parties presume that their disaffected adherents will vote for the party to prevent the other party's candidate from winning, the US will have a two party system in which both parties aim to capture the center, that is, the independents that decide elections as the swing vote. As a result, options will be limited, and selection of candidates will be determined by the bases of the two parties.

To break out of that pattern voters will have to clearly rejected it either by non-participation or voting third party candidates.